TV Review: Louie (5×02) “A La Carte”

After fatherhood, the Louie of Louie‘s post-divorce life is predominantly focused on what romantic satisfaction is supposed to look like.

Before he winds up going out with Pamela in the episode’s key segment, Louie tees it up with two sequences.

In the first, he needs to poop. His daughters know it before he does. They know what to do. They’ve clearly done this before. Louie doesn’t want to go to the bathroom at the store, or at any store. His daughters get called “little white bitches” by a store owner who won’t let their daddy poop and shrug it off. The whole scene is embarrassing, reminding everyone that one day, our body will be completely unreliable in preventing its most humiliating accidents.

And Louie gives up. He stands there, resigned, and shits himself.

Next, he tells a young comic, who talks about his horrifying childhood frankly and joylessly for his act, that he is not a good comedian, and that he can’t help him. But the kid only cares about being a comic, and refuses the notion of turning away.

Pressed, Louie sighs and tells him to try saying stuff in a squeaky voice and walks away.

While having a meal with Pamela, Louie wonders out loud if they could move in together, and Louie plays the version of himself who remembers what it’s like to get married while Pamela plays the version who remembers what it’s like to get divorced.

It’s a discouraging scene to any romantics in the crowd, tearing up the notion of couplehood like it’s a frog on a ninth grade biology table. And she tells Louie that he has maybe two good years of sex left in him.

Louie seems unable to be happy where he is, even if he knows leaving it might drive to more ruin for himself and his children.

Then, that night, he flips on Letterman to see a rising comic telling jokes in a squeaky voice.

Score: 8/10

Joey's a 23-year-old who graduated from the University of Minnesota Morris and now lives in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He enjoys art, activism, and politics, especially when he's looking at them through a lens of popular culture. First and foremost he's obsessed with popular music, but aside from what you'd expect, he's also into comic strips, graphic novels, cartoons, and indie games made for mobile phones (his highest tile in Threes is 3,072). He'll tell you that his favorite book of all time is Goodnight Moon. He needs more people in his life who understand the joys of Achewood.